How Much is Your Time Worth?

June 28, 2024

“Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.”

– Dan Martell

How Much is Your Time Worth?

How much for an hour of your time? Financial services company EmPower recently surveyed over 2,000 Americans on how much they value their time. On average, they valued an hour of their time at $240. 🤯 If you had an employee making that much per hour, they’d earn almost $500,000 a year, or about eight times the average annual income.* Knowing this, I’m thinking a cure for social media addiction would be a time-money tracker like the US Debt Clock. Those cat videos on TikTok? They’d cost you $4 per minute according to this survey. Was Nala Cat destroying a roll of TP really worth a matcha latte?

As a business person, knowing the value of your time is a practical matter. If your time is worth $50 an hour, you now have a measuring stick for which tasks to do yourself  and which things other people can do for less. Outsource low-dollar-per-hour tasks and focus on doing the high-dollar-per-hour work. I’ve written about smartly leveraging your time before.

So what is the current value of your time?

Here’s a simple formula for calculating it – Take your annual pay and divide by 2,000 (the total working hours for a year with two weeks of vacation). If you made $150,000 from your business last year, your hourly wage is $75/hour. You just chop off the three zeroes and divide by two.

So do the math. Determine your dollar-per-hour. With that knowledge in hand, you can work on raising it by doing more valuable work. You can delegate smartly. And hopefully, you can invest your time more wisely.

Ultimately the worth we place on our time is revealed by how we spend it. We may say we value our time but we rarely spend it like we do. The cost of anything is the amount of life you trade for it.

One question to ponder in your thinking time: If time was actually money, what’s one change I could make today to invest it better?

Make an Impact!

Jay Papasan

Co-author of The One Thing & The Millionaire Real Estate Agent ​

* More fun facts. Millennials placed the highest value on their time at $328.84 per hour (the equivalent of a $683,987 per-year salary), while Boomers set the lowest hourly wage for themselves at $137.19 per hour (a $285,355 per-year wage). I’m Gen-X and, apparently, we value our time at $215.90 an hour (or $449,072 per year in salary.) About a third of respondents answered $50 per hour, which at $104,000 per year is still about two times the national average.